Can AI outperform humans? Airbnb chief Brian Chesky bets on bots, replaces one-third of customer service staff
As Artificial Intelligence continues to replace human jobs around the world, Airbnb is joining the trend. The company said its in-house AI representative now handles nearly a third of customer support requests in North America, and plans to expand the service to other countries soon.
During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky said that if the feature’s global launch goes well, within a year he expects more than 30% of all customer support inquiries to be handled by AI via voice and chat in all languages for which Airbnb also employs human customer service representatives.
“We think this will be huge because not only will this reduce the cost base of Airbnb customer service, but it will also be a huge step change in the quality of service,” Chesky said, suggesting that AI bots could do a better job than their human counterparts at solving certain problems.
Increasing the use of artificial intelligence to make tasks easier
Internally, Airbnb is also increasingly using artificial intelligence. The company said that about 80 percent of its engineers already use AI tools in their work and that they aim to have the entire workforce adopt the technology.
Airbnb isn’t the only company betting on the future of artificial intelligence. Just the day before, Spotify claimed that its most experienced software engineers had not written a single line of code for months. However, interestingly, these workers were not laid off. Instead, they act as controllers of the AI system, focusing on directing, reviewing, and improving the system’s output rather than writing code themselves.
With evolving technology, many companies are facing disruptions due to AI, but Airbnb’s senior management believes that Airbnb has a special database and product that other AI chatbots cannot easily replicate. CEO Brian Chesky said regular chatbots don’t have access to Airbnb’s massive database of users and reviews, and they also can’t contact hosts directly like most guests do.
“A chatbot doesn’t have our 200 million verified identities or 500 million private reviews and can’t message hosts, which 90% of our guests do,” Chesky told analysts, adding that the company is instead trying to layer AI on top of the Airbnb experience. He claims that this move will only help further accelerate the company’s growth.
Could the artificial intelligence system become a risk in the long term? Chesky weighs in
Despite the positive growth outlook with AI integration, Airbnb investors remained cautious about the long-term impact of the technology. Some worry that advanced AI platforms could eventually enter the short-term rental market, making them direct competitors.
However, Chesky opposed this idea, stating that Airbnb is not just a consumer-facing app, but also a hosting app. According to him, it provides protection for consumers as well as customer services such as insurance and user verifications, which are difficult to replace.
He also added that traffic from AI tools already converts better than traffic from Google, suggesting that this shift could benefit Airbnb. The company is already using artificial intelligence to improve the way people search on its platform. The company executive said that currently this feature is available for a very small number of users as the company is trying to make the search function more interactive.
